LAST week we were talking about the importance of animals in our daily lives, specifically pets.
Well, a story has crossed my desk that indicates that man’s best friend, the dog, has been his best friend for a lot longer than we imagined.
Up to now popular thinking has been that dogs have been around with us humans for about 16,000 years, ever since we moved away from the strictly hunter-gatherer lifestyle to that of agriculture and therefore permanent settlements.
The family dog would have originally been the wolf, domesticated and tamed over a long period of time.
New evidence found in Russia’s remote Siberia has thrown a bit of a spanner in the works, however, suggesting that the wolf’s up-close-and-comfortable relationship with man may well go back at least 35,000 years.
A fragment of bone found in a human settlement and studied at the Swedish Museum of Natural History apparently belonged to a male wolf which was the most recent common ancestor of modern wolves and today’s dogs, such as Siberian huskies and Greenland sled dogs.
DNA analysis suggests this may have been an important point of evolution from the modern (well, 35,000 years ago) wolf and the domestic dog as we know it, a split that saw the dog developing along its own evolutionary line.
All this was happening at a time in human development when man would have seen the advantage of having dogs around for a number of very good reasons: firstly, an able-bodied assistant in those all-important hunting expeditions; secondly, there would have been rival groups or clans of us, so dogs would do what they still do, be watch dogs; finally, perhaps that was the beginning of a naturally symbiotic relationship between man and dog that exists to this day.
So, it looks as though your Jack Russell has been around somewhat longer than you imagined.
Good news for dogs, but I’m afraid some bad news for that other favourite family pet, the cat.
Apparently the moggie has become a problem in New Zealand, so much so that the Minister of the Environment is seriously proposing that each household be limited to two cats.
It seems that New Zealand’s domestic cat population poses a serious threat to many of the island nation’s unique natural species, including the national symbol, the kiwi, a flightless bird that falls easy prey to prowling cats.
The proposal has caused something of a national furore, quite naturally, with cat lovers (and I would imagine that includes most New Zealanders) up in arms.
The Prime Minister, John Key, has protested that his beloved cat, Moonbeam, wouldn’t dream of harming another living thing, particularly a kiwi, and for once the rest of the nation suddenly agrees with the Prime Minister.
At least half of all New Zealand households have at least one cat, and one in five have two or more.
I have no further details, but watch this space, things could turn nasty in normally placid New Zealand. Cheers!
Source: The Week: The Best of the British and Foreign Media.
